On a balmy Friday evening in the Dallas suburbs, Stephanie Richards stood outside the $60 million football stadium at Allen High School before the team’s game against McKinney High, its rival.
A lifelong Texan, she loves the spirit of Friday night lights. Her son, a sixth grader, has expressed interest in playing football, too, but wary of the risks of brain injury, she and her spouse have decided to hold off letting him play until he reaches high school.
Still, she said, there’s risk in any sport, and she feels reassured that the protective measures in place at the high school level — as opposed to youth football, which is staffed mostly with volunteer coaches — will keep him safe. “Do I think it’s a concern for him? No,” Ms. Richards said. “But I think as a parent, you’re always concerned about your kid.”
Like countless other parents, Ms. Richards has been trying to balance her love of football with her lingering worries about the risks of letting their son play such a violent game. For nearly two decades, she and other parents have heard about how concussions and years of playing a collision sport have damaged the brains of young and older players alike.
That delicate calculus between comfort and uneasiness was altered again by sobering news on Friday: Shane Tamura, who killed four people and himself in Midtown Manhattan in July, had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease linked to repeated head hits sustained in football and other contact sports.
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